This week on Sinica, I speak with Zhong Na, a novelist and essayist whose new piece, "Murder House," appears in the inaugural issue of Equator — a striking new magazine devoted to longform writing that crosses borders, disciplines, and cultures. In January 2024, a young couple, both Tsinghua-educated Google engineers living in a $2.5 million Silicon Valley home, became the center of a tragedy that captivated Chinese social media far more than American outlets. Zhong Na explores how the case became a collective Rorschach test — a mirror held up to contemporary Chinese society, exposing cracks in the myths of meritocracy, the prestige of global tech firms, and shifting notions of gender, class, and the Chinese dream itself. We discuss the gendered reactions online, the dimming of America's appeal, the emotional costs of the immigrant success story, and the craft of writing about tragedy with compassion but without sentimentality.
5:06 – How the story first reached Zhong Na, and the Luigi Mangione comparison
7:05 – Discovering she attended the same Chengdu high school as the alleged murderer Chen Liren
8:10 – The collaboration with Equator and Joan Didion's influence
10:30 – Education, class, and the cracks in China's meritocracy myth
16:01 – Tiger mothers vs. lying flat: two responses to a rigged system
19:12 – The pandemic and the dimming of the American dream
22:49 – Chinese men as perpetrators: immigrant stress and the loss of patriarchal privilege
25:56 – The gender war online: moral autopsy and victim-blaming
30:25 – The obsession with the ex-girlfriend and attraction to the accused
34:37 – The murder house, Chinese numerology, and the rise of Gen Z metaphysics
37:08 – Geopolitics, the China Initiative, and rethinking America as a destination
39:42 – Craft and moral compass: learning from Didion and Janet Malcolm
42:31 – Zhong Na's fiction: writing Chinese experiences without catering to Western expectations
Paying it forward: Gavin Jacobson and the editorial team at Equator
Recommendations:
Zhong Na: Elsewhere by Yan Ge
Kaiser: Made in Ethiopia, documentary by Xinyan Yu and Max Duncan (available on PBS)
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